With all the food crisis issues, both prices and availability, I think that the concept of homesteading and securing your food supply is (hopefully) hitting home to many people around the world.

These kinds of issues (nation/world wide issues) are almost 100% out of anybody's individual control. Doesn't matter if you are a flu bro, doomer, or in-between, the world did what it did, and we get to make it work.

I've finally turned my wife around to all of my homesteading "stuff". She is now 110% on board. It IS worth it. Not worth it when times are good, but when it all goes to shit, we still eat.

I think a conversation about how you will move forward with your own food procurement is a good idea.

For those with land: will you start your own food supply?
For urbanites: will you consider buying direct from farmers (such as whole/half meat)? Container/raised bed gardens? More freezers for meat?

For apartment dwellers, I got nothing . Maybe be a regular customer of a farm-to-table farmer? Perhaps even get into the suburbs where you can have square foot raised bed/container gardening? I know apartments don't have much room, but even a relatively small 7 cu ft chest freezer can hold a LOT of meat/dairy.

For everybody: We can't all grow/raise EVERYTHING we need, and we need to think about the infrastructure (even on our own land) to produce it. Will you change anything, either in food storage and/or your personal infrastructure?


The butcher we use to process our steers is now backed up until the end of the year. Everybody and their cousins are bringing in anything with 4 legs to freezer camp.

For those already producing some/most/all of their own food, what have you learned? What would you change?

One new thing I did this year was we had a very late freeze, and our apple trees had TONS of blossoms on them.

I got the tip of using the irrigation sprinkers, as my attempts to cover the trees failed (trees too big, skid steer too small/short).

Even though the tree was covered in ice come morning for something like 4 days in a row, well, pics and all:



This pic is now a few days old, but:

Look into Freedom Ranger meat chickens.

I no shit have butchered some out to be 12 pounds DRESSSED. Size of small turkeys. Most were around 6-8 pounds dressed though. There were many meals where my wife, son (about 10 at the time) and myself could only handle one breast for a meal, so a single chicken lasted almost a week of meals. They are robust, grow well (roosters are best, I advise to buy a straight run of roosters), and are feed efficient. I was raising those 12 pound monsters for $8 and change each. My whiz-bang plucker could ever so barely get the job done, even with a 3/4 hp motor . They forage well, and eat scraps just like a "regular" chicken. The meat is also insanely flavorful. IMHO, probably about the best homesteader meat bird. Just be ready to butcher once they start attacking each other and otherwise doing "rooster" things.

I decided that its better to butcher less huge birds than many small ones. YMMV though.

Where I ordered from

I think its 5-6 for the "recommended" butchering age. I let them go longer. Or feeding them all those big juicy June bugs really paid off

The females only get to 5-6 though, it was the roosters that would get huge if I let them. Year 1 I was using a large hot water bath canning pot for the scalding pot. They didn't fit . I had to cut the bottom off of a clean 55 gallon steel barrel and throw that on the turkey fryer base.

YMMV, maybe it was my feed? I got it from a local farmer. They just got that feed and what they would forage, plus what bugs I could trap.

I've always had great luck with barred rock. Very durable bird, good reliable layer of medium/large brown eggs. I probably get them to about 100+% in summer, but around 25% in winter w/o forcing them into laying.

Once they start attacking each other, typically 16 weeks or so. Putting apple cider vinegar in their water helps push this off a bit.

The extremely large roosters were a year old, we cherry picked the largest at butchering time and let them go. We actually kept a few for breeding experiments, but as expected, the chicks did not yield any desirable traits either meat or egg. Freedom Rangers are a hybrid, and do not breed true, but I decided to see what happened when I crossed them with a few heritage breeds we had.

I know its a bit more feed efficient to butcher at 8-12 weeks, but I try to let them forage as much as possible to reduce feed costs, and butchering is a PITA. Its the same PIA whether its a small or large bird, so I choose to be slightly less feed efficient and let them get bigger so I can raise/butcher less large birds than more small birds to get the same amount of meat.

Just the humungo ones. 16 weeks still gave FAR more meat per bird, but only on the roosters. The hens seemed to cap out rather small.

Heads up: those Freedom Ranger roosters are particularly, shall we say sexually active, even for roosters in general .